


White Rabbit

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 02:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1534712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Granddad (who all the grownups said was a little odd, but Jeff knew that was the best kind of granddad to have, the kind who wasn't really a grownup at all) said nonsense, it was only a hat.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>"It's a magic hat, laddie."</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>"What kinda magic, granddad?"</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>"You'll see, I'm sure, laddie."</i></p><p> </p><p> <br/>Or, how Jefferson, as a child, came to jump the realms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White Rabbit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheDarkRat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDarkRat/gifts).



Jeff's mommy clucked and shook her head, when Granddad gave him the hat. 

Jeff's father's mouth made a deep, sharp line and his eyes grew narrow and he said boys didn't play dress-up, and Granddad (who all the grownups said was a little odd, but Jeff knew that was the best kind of granddad to have, the kind who wasn't really a grownup at all) said nonsense, it was only a hat.

"It's a magic hat, laddie."

"What kinda magic, granddad?"

"You'll see, I'm sure, laddie."

The hat was too big. Jeff put it on and got lost in it at once. Mommy put her knuckle to her lips, like she did sometimes when she watched him play at being other people. 

(in Granddad's big house, sometimes the other people came to him, but at six he was wise enough to know you didn't tell grownups about the other people)

(one day he got mad and said cross words to mommy, something one of the other people had said, and she got angry with granddad, saying he'd taught cross words to Jeff)

"You'll grow, right you will."

Jeff grinned inside the hat. It was soft and smelled far away. He tilted it up and grinned. His dad still made that face like a cat's tail lashing forth and back, and mommy half-smiled, and Granddad said, "Aye, a real world-traveler you look like, real cosmopolitan."

"What's cosmi - cosmo - cosmempoly-tin?"

"Smart 'bout other people and other places."

Jeff felt his heart lift. He did know about other people. He was smart about the other people. Some of them wanted him to play outside with them. We can only play outside, they said. We are not allowed inside. 

But there were paths outside into the woods - which were, really, barely a tree-break some two-hundred yards between their house and the county highway - and those paths did not come out and the other people who came walking on those paths were not - were not - 

Jeff didn't have the words for the other people. Perhaps they would come to him. But he was wise as a child can be, who knows thick-sweet grownup lies and clamps his lips tight as if they're medicine. He knew those other people were not to be trusted, nor were the paths, where strange flowers grew. He picked them for mommy sometimes and when he brought them back she said they were lovely but they were not, they were only dandelions, and no what he had picked.

(if you come with us on the path, little one, we will show you prettier flowers, the other people said.)

At home, when mommy and dad shouted cross words, the hat slipped down over his ears and he didn't hear them anymore, he heard the other people. Some of them had lived here before, they claimed. 

Some of them had never lived at all.

Jeff played with his matchbox cars and his blocks and he played very quietly because mommy and dad did not like to be interrupted when they were cross with each other. 

He was lonely sometimes, but some of the other people were children, and he showed them his toys. One little girl with soft petal eyes and a blue dress. One boy a little older, dressed in a sailor's outfit, who spoke a different language full of sharp rises and deep hollows like snowdrifts. 

The little girl liked his cat, Molly, a round-faced tabby. She always came to play when Molly was there. He was very sad when he came home from school and mommy said that Molly had run away. He was sad because he was afraid the girl would not come back, but he was also sad because mommy had to lie to him. Molly would not have run away.

Jeff was glad, though, when the little girl came back and brought Molly with her.

"She was in the garden," the girl said.

"Shh," he said. "Dad's sleeping."

"It's alright. Your dad can't hear me, you know."

"He can't?"

"No, he never can." 

Molly wound herself around his legs. She felt like a spring breeze, feathery and cool. 

Molly was in the garden. The little girl brought her back, which was only right because Molly was not allowed outside.

"Granddad gave me my hat," Jeff announced to her. 

"You look like a gentleman!" She laughed.

"Is that good?"

"I think it's good. My sisters all like gentlemen very much."

Mommy called him for dinner. He left the hat, because dad didn't like it. 

He took it to school though, for show and tell. Some of the boys and some of the girls thought the hat was dumb, dumb, dumb. His teacher loved it. Jeff felt invincible when he wore it, like he could run faster than the older boys or even the cars on the road, like he could jump over a fence or off the highest point on the jungle gym and land without a scratch as if he were a cat, or one of the other people. The other people never got hurt - sometimes they were hurt, and sometimes he tried to offer them chips or a coke or a bandaid to make them feel better, especially if they were crying, but they told him no, no, it was no use, it wasn't.

Jeff realized, after a few days, that when the hat listed over his ears he heard the other people more clearly, and sometimes when he wore it he saw shapes of them he had not seen before, as if they had come from invisible paths, or slipped from behind trees, or from the creak of the swingset on the playground. 

"Little one, come and see, little one." 

The hat made him swift as a rabbit and clever as a cat. There was a hole in the playground fence one day and then everyone was crying. He did not know why until one of the littler boys came up to him beneath the slides and said, where's my mommy?

"That man said my mommy was in an accident, but I can't find her."

"Jeff? Jeff!" The teacher was shouting and scolding him. "Jeff, you can't run off! God, not now, not after - "

He waited for her. She stopped herself at once but when the hat slipped down he could hear other things, other thoughts scraping the inside of him, and felt the littler boy's cold hand.

"Come on Jeff. Your mom's waiting for you inside."

There was hardly anybody at the park after school that whole week, and the whole week after. Hardly anybody. Mommy kept him inside for days, and he played with his matchbox cars and his blocks and with cold Molly and the little girl and the boy who didn't speak his language and the littler boy who still couldn't find his mommy. 

He got angry, when the little boy cried. "You can't see mommy anymore! You can't see her! Alright, you can't! Shut up!" He kicked his bed and his toy chest and his blocks and mommy came to shush him because daddy is sleeping, Jeff, daddy is sleeping. 

Mommy was worried.

After days and days and days mommy took him to the park. "Jeff," she said, "don't go far, stay where I can see you, stay away from the road and the woods, Jeff."

Mommy had told him that hundred-million-thousand times. He sat on the swings and slid down the slide and he sat on the edge of the culvert below the long slope of grass. He always hoped he would see a fish or a crawfish or maybe a frog or two. But the culvert was shallow and the sun had been hot. The water glittered like pirate jewels, though, and it made a nice sound. Like whispers. 

He could hear the whispers under the hat. The park was full of whispers, it was full of other people, and he didn't know why no one else could see or talk to them. They were only other people, after all. There was a woman who came and cried on a bench almost every day he was there. Fed the birds and cried. Her daughter sat beside her and looked worried and she cried and rocked. There was a man in a uniform who came and touched the plaque below the American flag, and people hurried by without even glancing at him. There was a boy underneath a jungle gym at the far end of the park but he didn't go there, not because mommy told him not to, but because the shadow of one of the other people kept lurking there, and the boy kept crying. 

Jeff could hear mommy shouting at him at last, too. It was time to go. The sun was long. Mommy was saying they'd be late for dinner. He stood up, and his hat toppled off in the swift wind right into the culvert. 

It was shallow. He'd only be a minute. He could climb right back out, there was a tree fallen into the culvert just before the little footbridge... 

"Jeff! Jeff, come on, we have to go -"

He was hurrying. He really was. Trying to shake the water and dirt off his hat and get to the tree. 

He could have sworn he was on the tree. He could have sworn he only slipped. 

"Jeff, are you coming?"

That was not mommy. 

That was _not mommy._

Jeff could not see the clear daylight on the other side of the footbridge. He could not see the footbridge. Or the tree. Or the culvert. Or the park. Or mommy.

"Mommy?"

The stream was full of rocks and ran through thick woods. There was still a footbridge but he saw light at either end, and walked to it. "Mommy?"

"What are you doing here?" The stag said. It was a strange stag, with human feet wriggling toes on the moss. "No one every comes by this way."

"I'm looking for my mommy."

"What is a mommy?"

This was not a question Jeff knew how to answer. 

"I fell, trying to get my hat," he offered.

"You are too small to wear that hat," the stag said, stomping its bare feet. It had human teeth as well, perched precariously and razor-sharp in its tiny mouth. 

"I'll grow. Granddad said so."

"We do not have granddad here. What is granddad?"

"A person."

"You are a funny little one."

"Please, how do I go home?"

"Home? Home. What is home, how do you get there? I am in my place, I do not stray. Little one is far from home. I will leave you to die here, little one."

"What about my mommy?"

"There is no mommy here, maybe mommy is dead, what is mommy?"

"My mother!"

"The earth is mother. Is not the earth your mother? Oh, dear. I must be going little one."

The stag leapt away like a grasshopper and Jeff was alone in the thick tangled woods without the sound of cars or children laughing. He knew without a doubt there were other people here. He shivered because he was only wearing a t-shirt and shorts and sneakers and his hat and the woods were chill and damp. 

"Little one. Little one." Little mice with human hands at the roots of tree on the streambank. "Little one, little one. Come with us." Little mice smiling with their big black eyes. 

He was not sure about those eyes, or those hands. 

"Mommy," he whispered. He began to cry, in the dark woods under the little footbridge. "Mommy."

He climbed out of the stream and away from the deft hands of the little mice (who followed), and stood on the road. A horse came and snorted at the mice and stomped on their tails.

"I'm lost," Jeff said to the horse. The horse nudged him with its great brown head. "I'm lost." He gripped the leather of its reins and cried into its great long legs. The horse's snorted and shook its mane. The horse said nothing, perhaps it spoke another language, perhaps it was not a horse at all, Jeff was not sure in this place. There were no matchbox cars or tv dinners or bedspreads with superman on them in this place, he was sure. And there was no mommy, like the stag had said, no mommy. 

It felt like a long time later when the man came.

The horse still stood over him, and he hit between its wide feathered hooves, because the mice did not come near it. 

The man - who was real, he knew - came gruffly up the path. 

"Rotten snatchers, get 'way, get 'way." 

The mice shrieked and fled the road. 

"Hey now, Hugo, what's this you've found me? Too right big to be a snatcher, isn't he?"

The horse nickered softly.

"Laddie, what's the matter? Where's your parents?"

And the man's voice was so like granddad's that he looked up. Kind blue eyes and a gentle set to his jaw. But sweet things were often tricks, like when mommy said Molly ran away, or when the doctor said it wouldn't hurt to fix his broken arm. 

"Laddie?"

So like granddad's.

"I lost my hat in the culvert," he said, between the horse's knees. "I went to get it and I fell and I don't know how to get home."

The man is frowning at his hat, at his clothes, at his t-shirt with the grinning leopard on it and the blue shorts with the white stripes and the white sneakers with the red stripes. He is frowning like he knows something. Not lying. Not telling the truth. His voice, the set of his shoulders so like granddad's, and granddad was never like the other grownups.

The man says soft words in the lilting language granddad used sometimes in stories, when he looked after Jeff when dad was sleeping and mommy had to go away. When the fire in granddad's hearth grew low and dark and hot. 

"I think," the man said, "laddie, that you ought to come along with me. Ol' Hugo can only stare down the snatchers so long, and I do think they'd be as fond of you as your hat."

"My granddad gave it to me."

The man nodded. "What's your name, laddie?"

"Can you help me find my mommy?"

Soft eyes. Softer. Long shadows in his eyes. "No, lad, I can't."

Jeff begins to cry again, because he knew it already. There is no going home. There is no home, anymore. 

The man lifts him and puts him on the horse.

There is a house in a village and a barn where the horse lives. The house is warm and the fire is bright. 

The man's name is Marten. He is a carpenter, and a carver. His wife is dead and his daughter disappeared, he says, a long time ago. He thinks the snatchers got her, he says. 

Jeff sits on the floor and plays with a carved horse and wagon for many days. 

Jeff becomes a son to the man whose name is Marten who is daughterless and a widower. Jeff learns to work with his hands, clever as a cat and swift as a rabbit. Jeff outgrows his t-shirt and his shorts and his sneakers. 

Jeff grows tall. Jeff grows strong. Jeff grows into the hat. 

Jefferson, that's his name. It is the name that mommy gave him, and he knows there was more but he can't remember the rest, and maybe the snatchers took it.

He remembers dad. And Molly. And the girl with the blue dress. And the boy in the sailor suit. And the littler boy, who disappeared one day. And mommy. And granddad.

He dreams about her. 

Granddad said the hat was magic. He learns its wicked, wonderful magic as he grows. 

No matter what door he opens he never finds the culvert and the fallen tree and the park.

Jefferson dreams of her, and she is bent like the woman at the park on the bench crying, and she is crying, and she rests her hands on cool stone, which bears his name and the dates but he can't see it all, because she is crying. She rests her hands like a beacon in the dark. She never stopped looking for her son, for Jefferson.

Trees grow and broaden and seasons turn and the sun sets and the moon rises and all the worlds turn on their axis, jointed beside each other as boats in a storm, and he remembers. 

All the doors and all the realms. 

And he remembers.


End file.
